Heirloom

New Year’s, I fetched a mirrorHeavy, dark, and small,Across the grey-scale ocean,And hung it in the hall—

A lesser family souvenirNobody would miss,Swaddled in a carry-onAnd carried on to this,

Across the random zonesOf time, into the year,Into the headlong night.(It’s always later here.)

I’ve hung it on the wall,Eye-level, so I can chanceOn truth, unflattering,And meet an honest glance.

The rooms that it has heldIn the chapel of its eye,In houses lost to banks or floodIn a century gone by,

And the visages of kinLong cancelled, have slid acrossThis surface, with no rippleDilating life or loss,

A stream of oblivionPours through its portal, brightAnd changeable, or darkAnd still—by day or night,

Forgetting, frame by frame,Moment by moment castLike a black stone over the shoulderInto the backward past.

Sharks

My son’s been reading about sharks for hours.

He is aglow with facts he must relateAbout their habitat, their length, their weight,About their intelligence, their relative powers.

Again and again, I must prove amazed—Aren’t they marvellous! Then, down and dazed,40 million sharks are killed a year!

I swear to never, ever eat shark-fin soup.There were sharks, he says, before the dinosaurs.The facts keep ticking on an endless loop

Rattled off like stocks or baseball scores. Awestruck himself, he preaches awe and fear:Our wastefulness, Time’s deeps, all that devours.

Consider the shark, more ancient than insects or flowers.

Pandora

It was the Iron Age. The men had been drinking,Those two surly brethren, Hindsight and Forethought.They sent her down to the cellar to fetch more wineEven though she’d murmured, “You’ve both had enough.”

Forethought, at least, you’d think would eschew a hangover.But then he was always cocky: he’d filched sparksFrom the gods, and hadn’t foreguessed, despite his name,The prank would backfire. His liver hadn’t yet

Begun to creak as if an eagle tore it each morning.Hindsight, her husband, of course remorsed their marriage.He’d said she was a punishment from Zeus,And that virginity made for a sorry dowry

Depreciating soon as you drove it off the lot. There was just a dram in the drained keg, and thatShe thought she’d just drink herself, dregs be damned.Broach a new cask? They were huge, a fathom tall,

A man could drown in them, set deep in the floor,So you could reach the mouth. She pried openThe charactered seal with only her grappling fingers, But the wine had vinegared, or worse. What fumes!—

Acrid, with notes of brimstone. Flies belched out.Hindsight would give her a beating tonight for sure.Ouch: just then the baby gave a disgruntled kick Right behind where she would have had a belly button

If she’d been born, instead of just made up by poets.Hindsight hankered for sons, more braces of handsFor his failure of a farm. But if it were a daughter,She’d have some company, and name her Heather maybe, or Hope.

The last I heard his laugh

The last I heard his laugh, he, not long deadStill had his sense of humor. I heard the boomFrom down the hall, his old department’s floor,And trailed it through the maze of beige, the laughLarger than death. I glimpsed him through a door,Which, almost shut, grinned open just a chink:A meeting, maybe, where he shared a jokeWith colleagues, as the afternoon adjournedAnd made light of some shadows on a graph.And passing by, I only meant to pokeMy head around and wave. But with a winkThat meant, “I see you. Don’t come in,” he turnedBack to the dim agenda of the room,To matter with which I was not concerned.

A. E. STALLINGS is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. Her most recent collection is Olives. She is completing a verse translation of Works and Days (Hesiod) for Penguin Classics.